One graduate student told me, “When the Apocalypse comes, you want to know an archaeologist, because we know how to make fire, catch food, and create hill forts,” and I promptly added her to my address book. Knows how to make hill forts – who can say when that will come in handy?

Who knows how many people are invisible because their stories don’t fit our categories?

Yes, librarians use punctuation marks to make little emoticons, smiley and frowny faces in their correspondence, but if there were one for an ironic wink, or a sarcastic lip curl, they’d wear it out.

They seemed to be quiet types, the women and men in rubber-soled shoes. Their favorite word, after literacy, was privacy – for their patrons and themselves.

You can tell the archaeologists, of course, by their photos. The tourists’ photos feature people in front of mountains, terraces, stone structures, sundials. The archaeologists wait until the people move away to take theirs: they want the terrace, the stone wall, the lintel, the human-made thing, all sans humans.

Bibliomancy: “Divination by jolly well Looking It Up.

Bibliomancy? It’s defined for us a little further down: “Divination by jolly well Looking It Up.

It seems there was a custom in Ireland at this time of showing obeisance to your king by sucking his nipples. No nipples, you could not be a king.

One of the advantages of living in the Ice Age would be that there are not very many people around. You’re constantly moving, and you have to live by your wits. You can’t just have fifteen different kinds of tools, you can’t carry them. And no villages – no village idiots. Imagine a world free of idiots!” Idiots, he liked to point out, “don’t survive in environments with lions.

Some of these tools were ingenious, including sets of playing cards for Iraq, Egypt, and Afghanistan – regular fifty-two-card decks, but with images and information about archaeological practices, famous cultural sites, and notable artifacts; the reverse sides could be pieced together to form a map of the most iconic site for each country.